In the spring of 2002, an 11-year-old child actor from Newark, New Jersey went to see the new Spider-Man film. Looking up at the screen, this young viewer was less taken with Tobey Maguire’s friendly, neighbourhood superhero and more with his love interest, Kirsten Dunst’s character, Mary Jane “MJ” Watson. “I was like: ‘Why are they calling her MJ? Oh, Mary Jane,’” recalls the 27-year-old actor MJ Rodriguez. “I actually have those initials in my name. She’s a girl, and she has those initials? OK. So, I just put them up to my name.”

When it comes to screen epiphanies, Rodriguez – who was born a boy, but has been a trans woman for all her adult life – knows that the adoption of her two-letter handle is only a minor alteration. Changing lives and offering knowledge via a compelling on-screen presence is something Rodriguez and her fellow cast members in the new TV show Pose are intimately familiar with; they have been doing it all summer long.

Their hit new TV series, which premiered on 21st Century Fox’s FX channel at the beginning of June, has much in common with other recent successful period dramas, from Mad Men to The Crown to Glow. There are fabulous costumes, fabulous music and fabulously outmoded social mores. However, unlike the ad-office bum slaps of those mid-century TV programmes, the hypocrisy that Pose highlights still feels remarkably fresh, perhaps because it’s only set in the recent past – New York City in the late 1980s – and maybe also because plenty of the behaviour that this show holds up as abhorrent really wasn’t viewed as that bad, even a few years ago.

Pose’s dramatic through-line follows Rodriguez’s character, Blanca Evangelista, within New York’s ballroom community, as she leaves one “house”, or band of mainly trans women performers, and forms a rival one. The ballroom scene, which draws a largely gay, largely black crowd to watch mainly (though not exclusively) trans performers competing for trophies by “walking” or performing in certain categories, is familiar to anyone who has seen Jennie Livingston’s excellent 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, read up on the story behind Madonna’s 1990 single Vogue, or caught a little of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

It may have once seemed risque territory for a popular TV series, but in 2018 the inherent drama is obvious, pretty much from Pose’s opening scene. The eight episodes of the first series are golden-era TV gold, with sharp dialogue, exquisite disco, house and boogie records, as well as lots of dancing and sex. There are vicarious thrills on offer for any straight, white suburbanites curious to see what a walk on the wild side in 80s New York City might have looked like. Evan Peters (American Horror Story, The X-Men) puts in a fantastic turn as a young Trump Tower exec torn between his family life and the surprisingly tender love he feels for his trans glamour girl, Angel. There are soap-style conflicts within the ballroom, as Rodriguez’s character competes against her old mentor, Elektra Abundance, for the title of House Mother of the Year; and there are grittier threats beyond, as the girls seek love and money in a city that’s riven with racism, sexism and transphobia.

Yet the show is not all sex, disco and identity politics. Pose presents itself, quite explicitly, as family drama, with Rodriguez’s character as house mother, and many sincere portrayals of maternal and fraternal love, loyalty and tender domestic care. This gentle, pastoral element is all the more touching when Pose shows how many of its gay and trans characters of colour have been rejected by their biological families, and have no one to turn to but each other.

“There are a lot of aspects of the ballroom scene that people don’t know about,” Rodriguez says. “People have this preconceived notion of trans women being prostitutes, or somehow promiscuous, especially when it comes to African Americans. Yet there’s way more to it. There’s a lot of hope and comfort and nurturing in the ballroom scene. People came to us because they needed a place of comfort, they needed a family, they needed a house mother.”

Rodriguez became part of the scene at the age of 14, when she fell into the care of her house father, Timothy J Smart. “He spotted me out and said: ‘That’s my daughter,’” she recalls.

She may have missed the Aids epidemic, and the spike in bigotry that accompanied it, but even in the mid 2000s, she says, there was plenty to fight for, and the idea of a popular, mainstream, sympathetic mainstream TV show would have been a beloved and distant prospect for Rodriguez and her fellow ball-goers.

“It would be something that I would be extremely elated and happy about,” she says, “It speaks to a group that’s been marginalised in their lives – and one of the biggest ones that don’t understand is the LGBT community itself.”

Pose does, indeed, examine the tensions that lie between the more conventional gay scene and the trans community. Rodriguez’s character is repeatedly refused service in a gay bar where the management and patrons prefer their clientele with chest hair and biceps, rather than slingbacks and a perm. On more than one occasion the programme tackles the subject of trans women’s lovers; are the men such a woman attracts suppressed gays, it asks.

The Aids crisis is handled sensitively too, not as a massive, doomy threat to public health but more as a series of sorrows, recurring fears and squalid injustices: hospital staff don’t dare feed a bed-ridden old boyfriend; a housewife has to ask her doctor for an awkward blood test; a trans woman wonders whether to tell a potential lover about her HIV status; a dancer gets a fever, but then it passes.

Crucially, the show presents trans women not as faintly dotty comedic fall guys – as many programmes from M*A*S*H to Friends have – but as rounded human beings. It is hard to see how any of this could have ever been so deftly handled if the show hadn’t employed not only trans women in all the appropriate roles, but also a number behind the scenes.

Pose has the largest transgender cast of any commercial, scripted TV show; trans writers Janet Mock and Our Lady J also worked on the script alongside the show’s creators, Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Steven Canals, with Mock directing the sixth episode. The show also brought in choreographers and consultants on good terms with the old scene.

Rodriguez heard about the show through two friends of hers, “two strong, eloquent, trans women of colour,” she says. “They told me: ‘MJ, you need to go for this role.’ When I read the casting breakdown I was like: ‘Oh, snap, baby, if that’s not me … ’ I had to pull out my acting chops, but I could really pull from my own experiences.”

Her mother had friends who had passed away from Aids, which she fed into her performance. “It was really important for me to convey those stories from back in the day, through the screen,” says Rodriguez.

Jennie Livingston, director of Paris Is Burning, also served as consulting producer on Pose, and was able to introduce a number of the subjects from her documentary to the cast of this fictionalised account. Many of the real-life ballroom figures Livingston filmed have since died. Yet she believes the old guard would have looked favourably on this dramatised version of their lives.

“While of course I can’t know how everyone in the film would feel or does feel, I strongly believe that Willi Ninja and Dorian Corey, the two people from Paris Is Burning I was closest to, would love the show,” she explains. “The show is so respectful of their world, and it’s opening up so many opportunities for queer and trans writers, producers, actors and crew.”

Some might watch Livingston’s old documentary and this new TV show and feel that the travails of those earlier figures have been trivialised for entertainment’s sake, but Livingston rejects this. “For me, all increased visibility is good,” she says. “What would be ideal is if we’d get to a point when it’s not in any way unusual to portray a particular community or kind of story that’s unfamiliar to mainstream viewers.”

Livingston draws a surprising but enlightening comparison with Pose’s dramatic territory and fantasy dramas. “Like, Game of Thrones and Monty Python and the Holy Grail are both similar and dissimilar,” she says, “and we’re unsurprised when both can exist on a continuum of – serious to silly – costumed mythic violence. We just assume that’s as it should be.”

Rodriguez also believes that Pose’s primetime prominence is positive, as it will educate the masses, who might otherwise draw different conclusions about her and her friends, as well as a far smaller, more curious constituency, who may want to join them.

“Not only is it sending a message of love,” she says. “It’s sending a message of understanding and education. A lot of people aren’t educated about our lives. I’m happy Pose is doing this, and getting younger kids to understand it, if they’re going through something similar.”

Although Rodriguez is still in her 20s, the perception of trans women has changed markedly during her lifetime. In 2011, she won praise for her role as Angel Dumott Schunard in a production of the musical Rent. In that musical’s first run in 1993 – which was viewed as groundbreaking at the time – Angel was described as a drag queen, a man who wore women’s clothes, rather than someone who asserted her own gender.

Rodriguez says that, when she took on the role, she reworked the part in her own image, and now looks back laughing at that old, crude terminology. “We were called drag queens,” she admits, “because we didn’t have a name for us back in the day.”

There is less misunderstanding now. Rodriguez retired from the ballroom scene in her late teens, but she has been back to one big ball in New York, the Heritage Ball, following the series’ success. “I didn’t walk,” she says. “I was kind of getting pictures left and right, but did get onstage and do a little bit of vogueing.”

You might assume that the crowd who caught this off-screen performance were almost exclusively gay. Not so, says Rodriguez.

“The ball scene was never really only gay people,” she explains. “I think people have this notion that if there’s a man hanging around a gay man he must be gay, but that’s just stigma. Back in the day, it was the same; there were lots of different people there: gay, straight, whatever. They did not care what they were called because they knew who they were.”

TV viewers everywhere will have the chance to gain a similar level of understanding. We can all, in a limited sense, now go to the ball.